Accessories for standard halogen lamps such as MR16 lamps include, for example, lenses, diffusers, color filters, polarizers, linear dispersion, accessories, collimators, projection frames, louvers and baffles. Such accessories are commercially available from companies such as Abrisa, Rosco, and Lee Filters. These accessories can be used to control the quality of light from the lamps including elimination of glare, to change the color temperature of the lamp, or to tailor a beam profile for a particular application.
Generally, accessories for certain lamps (e.g., halogen lamps) are required to withstand high temperatures. Often, such halogen lamp accessories require disassembly of the lamp from the luminaire to incorporate the accessory. This set of disadvantages results in the accessories having high costs and being cumbersome and/or expensive and/or complicated to install.
Moreover, with the advances in LED illumination, LED lamps offer much longer lifetimes, much more efficient lighting and other attributes that improve function and reduce overall cost of ownership. This situation provides a baseline for introducing features into LED lamps in order to still further improve the utility of LED lamps. For example, LED lamps can be fitted with a wide variety of active accessories. Miniaturized electronics have become very small, and relatively inexpensive (e.g., a CCD camera), thus setting up an opportunity to deploy miniaturized electronics adapted as active accessories to be used in conjunction with LED lamps.
There is a need for improved approaches for attaching field-installable accessories to lamps and/or lamp systems.